The End of the Second Floor Hallway
by Risu Alto
Summary: For a Tumblr prompt: An AU in which Natsu doesn't understand the repercussions of his dorm location, and meets a certain animation major due to her incessantly loud music. Rated for some sparse language. NaLu and some side Gajevy/GaLe.
1. Chapter 1

When Natsu's dorm manager warned him about the window dorm at the end of the hallway on the second floor, he (as usual) just brushed it off and assured the older man that he'd be totally fine. It was fully his intention to simply tease the crap out of whichever unlucky freshman happened to have the comparable room in the dorm next door, probably keep him up all night and challenge the kid to staring contests through their windows, which faced each other as he found out after opening the curtains for the first time.

Natsu hadn't counted on seeing a _girl_ staring back at him.

She was actually kind of pretty, with her blonde hair and brown eyes that he could barely make out from the twenty-five feet between their dorm buildings, but Natsu also realized that she was easily embarrassed. Shortly after making eye contact, the girl seemed to realize that she wasn't exactly decent, only wearing a fluffy white towel around her obviously curvy body. With a flush of her cheeks and a muffled scream of " _Pervert!_ " the curtain of her room slammed closed (as much as fabric can slam), and Natsu figured that would be the end of it.

A few months into the semester, Natsu was proven wrong as he caught the tail ends of an argument coming from the mysterious blonde girl's dorm.

" _But Levy-chan! I can't possibly switch classes right now!"_

" _Lu-chan, why not? You're so talented, why waste it?"_

" _Are you saying majoring in animation and all my writing classes are a waste?"_

" _Absolutely_ not _, Lu-chan! It's just…"_

After that, the argument must have settled because Natsu didn't hear any more. But that was the first night when _music_ became a problem. Natsu had spent the better part of his evening after that hanging out in the dorm across the hallway (which belonged to someone named Loke, and the lucky bastard didn't have a roommate), but when he returned in the early hours of a new morning, tired and ready to crash, Natsu found he couldn't thanks to the blasting stereo from that girl's dorm.

Natsu subsequently invested in a pair of earplugs.

Some weeks later, Natsu discovered via unfortunate circumstances and process of elimination that the name of the blonde girl was not Levy, and therefore was "Lu." Levy McGarden had become the temporary talk of the campus after being essentially crucified in the commons along with two of her friends by one of the local gangs. It became well known after that incident that Levy had blue hair, not blonde.

Natsu was ridiculously pissed when he found out that the kid responsible (named Gajeel something-or-other) was transferred into his dorm building.

Natsu nearly burned down said dorm building upon discovering that Gajeel had moved in with Loke right across the hallway.

Ultimately, he performed no such pyrotechnics after the dorm manager Makarov (whom Natsu had taken to and now affectionately called Gramps) gave the entire dorm a lesson in second chances. Natsu still wanted a chance to punch Gajeel. Sure, he didn't _know_ Levy McGarden all that well, but tying her to a tree and painting the Phantom Lord gang symbol on her stomach was a pretty dick move in his book.

Natsu also wasn't able to forget that incident, because apparently "Lu" was pissed about it. Her music was sad, angry, and _loud_ for an entire two weeks afterwards, loud enough that Natsu's earplugs didn't block it out all the way.

During the first week, Natsu tried to be patient. It wasn't a trait he was especially known for, but _compassion_ was, and so, feeling bad for her friend, he grit his teeth, buried his head under a pillow, and rode out the loud basslines.

In the second week, Natsu started to notice something. If he was quiet, listening really close to the window, sometimes he could make out a singer. He though, at first, that maybe his window-mate just had some kind of bonus downloads with an additional singer, but when one of his favorite songs came on, Natsu knew that wasn't the case.

He'd never heard this woman before, but her voice was, in a word, awesome. It was girlish and high enough that he could make her out over the original track, but also held the qualities of a rock star. In other words, if Natsu hadn't known this song so well, he probably would have thought she was part of the band.

After a few days of listening closely, like that, Natsu deduced that the voice must have belonged to the girl in the room. He took a wild guess, then, at what the blonde and her friend Levy might have been arguing about. If "Lu" really could sing that well, then Levy'd had a point about wasting talent. _That voice_ on an animation major? Seemed kind of unfair.

Entering the third week of falling asleep on the blonde's schedule, Natsu was pretty fed up. So, tossing respect for her friend's situation to the wind, Natsu stalked to his window, yanked open the curtains, took a deep breath, and yelled at the top of his lungs, " _Would you turn that shit down?!_ " He really didn't care at this point if someone in his own dorm heard him. Enough was e-f*cking-nough.

Seconds later, the music faded out, and the blonde opened her curtains, shouting back, "What?"

Crossing his arms, Natsu repeated, "I know you're an animation major and all that, but does your music have to be that loud?"

"How did you—" she started to ask, but then turned her head to the side. Clearly someone wasn't happy about the shouting (though why that bothered them and not the music was a mystery), because the blonde girl held up one finger, ducked out of sight, and reappeared with a large sketchpad in hand. In black ink, the pad read, _How do you know my major?_

"Heard you arguing about it with that Levy girl a few weeks back," he answered, a little quieter. "Lu" looked away, and Natsu felt bad. Now that he thought about it, mentioning Levy so casually was probably not a great idea. But Natsu wasn't known for holding his tongue, and instead started searching for something else to say.

Suddenly, a thought struck him. Having a playboy as a dorm-neighbor was sometimes disturbing (in more ways than one), but in this situation, Natsu was grateful. Loke was always going on and on about how to properly flirt, and the one thing he always recommended? _Compliments_.

"She was totally right about your voice by the way," Natsu called through the window, and seeing that the blonde girl's attention was back on him, he opened his window and stuck his head out. "You're really good," he added, voice almost back to its normal level.

A warm blush appeared on the blonde's cheeks, and she shook her head. _Sorry about the music_ , she wrote on her pad after a minute.

Natsu shrugged. "Turn it down a little next time, will ya?" he asked, smiling. "At least, y'know, at night."

She nodded, scribbled a quick, _Okay_ , and started to reach for the curtains.

Quickly, for no good reason, Natsu stopped her with a call of, "What's your name? It starts with 'Lu,' right?" The blonde nodded again, but didn't actually tell him her name. Cheekily grinning, Natsu asked, "Well I'll just call you Luigi until you tell me."

"It's _Lucy!_ " she yelled back, cheeks puffed. A hand quickly clapped over her mouth when _Lucy_ remembered she was supposed to be quiet.

"Lucy, huh?" Natsu repeated, testing it. "Cool," he said. "I'm Natsu." Another nod in reply. "Well, I'm gonna take advantage of the peace and quiet to sleep. Goodnight, Luigi."

 _LUCY!_ said the sketchpad. Natsu laughed, shut the window, and then the curtains.

As he climbed into bed, Natsu chuckled softly to himself. _So her name's Lucy_ , he thought, feeling contentment and warmth in his stomach. _Geez, she's loud._ But maybe having the dorm on the end of the second floor hallway wasn't so bad after all.


	2. Chapter 2

As it turned out, the one conversation Natsu had with Lucy didn't actually stop her from blasting music. But, he did notice that it was at least a few decibels quieter during the day, and once 10:00PM rolled around, he couldn't hear anything from her room at all. It was weird, at first, not falling asleep with a hum of music in his ears, but Natsu was nonetheless grateful and adjusted quickly.

Another thing that one conversation didn't do was encourage further interaction. In fact, since that one late-night confrontation, Natsu hadn't heard a thing from Lucy, even when he sat right by the window to (grudgingly) work on homework. Some small part of him kind of hoped that one of those days, he might hear something from her. But it seemed that Lucy wasn't going to start anything, and Natsu figured that was pretty rational because after all, they were pretty much strangers.

When Natsu mentioned this to Gray, accompanied by a definitely-not-pout, Natsu was met with a completely shameless bout of laughter from his apparent rival/best-friend-who-would-never-admit-to-being-his-best-friend.

"What's so funny, stripper?" he demanded as Gray continued to snigger at him.

"You have a _crush_ ," Gray said like it was as obvious as Natsu's love for fire ( _no_ , what do you mean Natsu almost blew up Gray's room? That never happened…)

"No way in hell!" was the incensed response Natsu offered, leaning a little closer.

Gray shrugged and leaned back on his bed, sighing, "Ah well. I guess it doesn't matter because you're probably too stupid to know how to ask her out anyway."

And that comment, of course, degenerated into a full out wrestling match on the floor of Gray's room, but Gray didn't quickly forget the conversation. In fact, whenever the boys in Makarov's dorm got together to do _anything_ , Gray seemed to go out of his way to give Natsu a hard time about his supposed "crush" on the girl across from his window.

Just to prove Gray wrong though, Natsu stopped sitting near the window to do his homework. After all, besides the fact that she was kind of pretty, shared a lot of his taste in music and could sing, Natsu had absolutely no reason to be interested in her.

Yeah, _besides_ all of that. No reason at all.

By the end of that month, Natsu had successfully put the mysterious and somewhat-pretty Lucy on a backburner in his mind, and his attention was now solely focused on trying to find something to hang over Gray's head as revenge.

Also, schoolwork, but that wasn't nearly as interesting.

Nonetheless, when Natsu set his mind to a task, he had a tendency to tune everything else out, which is why (he supposed) Gajeel had nearly broken his door by the time Natsu looked up from filling out some diagrams long enough to realize that someone was knocking.

His deep green eyes set into a glare, nearly turning black, upon seeing Gajeel's unmistakable pierced face and mane of black hair. "What do you want, ya bastard?" he asked, hoping that Loke's infamous roommate would either:

a) Leave and let the door hit him in the butt as he did

Or

b) Stay long enough for Natsu to find a reason to punch him into next week.

Gajeel ultimately did neither. "You know that shrimp's friend, right? The blonde one?" It was common knowledge around the dorm that Gajeel never spoke of Levy by name, usually settling for _bookworm_ or _shrimp_ if he had to talk about her.

"You talkin' about Lucy?" Natsu asked, suddenly feeling defensive. Was something up with her? Or worse, had Gajeel done something to her too?

Seeming to guess Natsu's train of thought, Gajeel rolled his sharp, sable eyes and said, "I haven't been near her. Just wonderin' if ya know her as well as Gray said."

Muttering something distinctly like, "Friggin' Ice Prick," under his breath, Natsu clenched a fist, then rested it on the door frame while inwardly re-swearing revenge against Gray and exhaling. "Why do you wanna know, anyway?" he questioned. "I've had like, one conversation with Lucy."

"Great," the thug grumbled, grabbing Natsu's wrist off the door frame and pulling.

"Hey!" Natsu yelled, struggling and eventually managing to pull his arm free. "What d'you think you're doing?!"

Gajeel paused in the hallway, just about to descend the staircase back to the ground floor, and grouched, "We're goin' over to their dorm."

For a second, Natsu just spluttered, but finally managed to ask, "What'd you say?"

"I ain't repeating myself," asserted Gajeel.

"Bastard," Natsu called him again, but then asked, "Why are you dragging me into this? Actually, why're you going over there at all? And what does Lucy have to do with it?"

"Blondie and the shrimp are best friends," Gajeel said, more hesitantly. "Thought this might be easier if… ya know, you two were there."

"You mean me and Lucy?" Natsu was still confused, and cocked his pink-haired head to the side as he asked again, "What are you planning?"

Gajeel sighed. Even that sounded harsh and threatening, but when he answered Natsu without looking the shorter sophomore in the face and his voice was so low that it was pretty much just a growl, something (instinct, he claimed) told Natsu that this was about as "gentle" as Gajeel was ever going to get.

"All that stuff Gr—I mean, Makarov keeps sayin' about second chances," he started. "Think it's finally getting to me. I gotta start somewhere."

Natsu blinked. "So you're gonna apologize?" he asked slowly.

The word _apologize_ seemed to snap Gajeel back to his senses, and he fixed Natsu with a glare. "I ain't explainin' myself to a flame brain like you," he said, grabbing Natsu's arm again and pulling him down the stairs, despite his protests.

Natsu kept complaining, loudly, about the whole situation, even as Gajeel dragged him through the doors of the girls' dorm next door. His complaints were shut up quickly by an impatient cough and a very threatening sounding, "Can I _help_ you boys?"

Said boys looked around, finding a redheaded woman (who honestly didn't look much older than either of them) sitting behind the dorm lobby's desk, glaring at them both. A dark aura of ' _Explain yourselves or get the hell out'_ hung about the woman as Gajeel dropped Natsu and marched up to her. "You the dorm manager?" he asked gruffly.

"The manager is out," replied the woman evenly, "and I am standing in. But I'm sure that our manager really wouldn't appreciate two rowdy boys tracking dirt all over the lobby and disturbing our dorm…" And the _look_ she coupled with those two sentences was enough to make Natsu flinch from on the floor where Gajeel dropped him. When the redhead looked over in his direction, her eyes widened a little. "Natsu?" she asked, a little less dangerously.

"H-h-hi Erza," he said, waving meekly.

Gajeel raised an eyebrow in his direction, probably confused by the almost complete 180 in Natsu's behavior, and asked, "You know her?"

Erza answered for him: "Natsu, myself, and his friend Gray Fullbuster have a few classes together."

Gajeel addressed Natsu again. "Gray's your _friend_?" he scoffed.

At those words, Erza narrowed her eyes and asked pointedly, "Have you and Gray been fighting again?"

"N-n-n-n-no ma'am!" Natsu squeaked, jumping to his feet and saluting. He continued without a breath, "And I'm really, really sorry we bothered you; we were just coming over to see if we could drop in on Lucy and Levy because apparently Gajeel wants to apologize but that's okay because we can just come back another time, right Gajeel?"

Before Gajeel could actually get a word in, a very soft voice asked, "You came here to apologize to Levy?"

In the doorway stood a girl with long, wavy blonde hair and a sparsely patterened dress. The white headband she wore made it look like the girl had little fluffy ears on her head, and her green eyes were bright with confusion and (Natsu wasn't sure, but it looked like) hope.

"Manager!" Erza suddenly exclaimed, leaning over the desk, and Natsu did a double take. The girl with the fluffy headband looked young enough to be Erza's little sister, and looked absolutely nothing like most of the other authoritative dorm managers on campus. Then again, Natsu supposed, he _had_ heard some weird rumors about a manager named Bob on the other side of campus. "These two hooligans were just leaving," continued Erza, oblivious to his train of thought.

However, the apparent manager shook her head at Erza and said in that same soft voice, "I think it's okay." Then she turned to Gajeel (Natsu felt _incredibly_ sidelined at this point) and explained, "My name is Mavis Vermillion, and I'm the manager of this dorm. Levy is probably in Lucy's room about now if you want to see her."

Gajeel looked away. "Thanks," he huffed quietly, like he didn't actually want to be heard.

Erza was speaking again though, insisting, "Manager, I really don't think this is a good idea!"

But Mavis held up a hand as she watched the two boys start upstairs. As Natsu was reminding Gajeel that Lucy's room was at the end of the hallway, he could swear that he heard Mavis telling Erza something like, "Everybody deserves a chance to fix their mistakes. Have a little faith."


	3. Chapter 3

**I don't like leaving notes if I can avoid it, but this is important. I'll be brief.**

 **Long story short: I'm going on vacation and will not update as frequently as I have been until September. Updates may still occur, though, and I will not drop this story. I promise.**

* * *

Natsu flinched when Lucy slammed the door in his and Gajeel's faces. He couldn't help thinking that, for someone who looked delicate, Lucy was obviously much stronger than her appearance let on, because Natsu was pretty sure that the walls had shaken from the force she used to fling the door shut.

Obviously, things hadn't gone as planned. In fact, Gajeel didn't even manage to get two words out before Lucy recognized him, and her response was to throw the door closed and lock it (Natsu heard the clicks of a deadbolt sliding into place).

"Well, looks like she hates you enough that I'm not making any difference here," Natsu shrugged.

Gajeel sighed, and although he looked a bit disappointed, Natsu didn't see any shock in his dark features. "Thanks," he growled sarcastically.

"Go away!" The voice from the other side of the door definitely belonged to Lucy, who had heard them talking through her door.

Part of Natsu wanted to comply. He wasn't exactly loyal to Gajeel in the same way that he was to other dorm-mates like Gray and Loke. But another part remembered how Gajeel, the big, macho, ex-gang-member-tough-guy had showed up at his door and asked (or, really demanded) Natsu's help.

The latter part won out. Natsu could imagine that Makarov would be pretty proud if he ever found out about this as he called out, "Hey, Lucy."

"I said go away," she answered. "How'd you even get in here, anyway?"

"Your dorm manager let us in," Gajeel said. Lucy didn't answer him.

"Is Levy with you?" Natsu asked.

Quickly, Lucy replied, "No," but her answer was a little too fast and a touch too loud, and Natsu knew she was lying, afraid like he himself had been, that Gajeel might be trying to hurt Levy again.

A breath before Natsu could call bullshit, Gajeel spoke up again. "When you see her," he said, though something in his tone also suggested that Gajeel saw through Lucy, "could you give her a message?"

No response. Gajeel continued, "Tell the shrimp that I just wanna talk. Face-to-face. That's all."

Still Lucy said nothing, and Gajeel seemed to think there wasn't anything else to say, so he turned and started back down the hallway. Natsu didn't follow immediately. "Would ya just give him a chance, Lucy?" he asked. "I mean, I didn't believe Gajeel at first either. Honestly I still don't trust him, but, if there's one thing you learn from our dorm manager, it's that everyone can get a fresh start if they try. Gramps trusts Gajeel, and I trust Gramps, so… maybe you could trust me and give him a shot?"

There was shuffling inside the room after a second. Faintly, Natsu made out a hushed whisper but couldn't hear what was said. But a grating noise behind the door signaled Natsu that the deadbolt was undone, and Gajeel was standing next to him again when Lucy pulled the door open partway.

"You call your dorm manager 'Gramps?'" she asked, eyebrows raised.

"He's an old geezer," Natsu said with a grin.

Lucy stepped back so that the two boys could come inside. Eyeing Gajeel warily, she said, "Stay by the door," and walked across the room to sit on her bed beside a certain bluenette who also had her eyes on Gajeel. Levy's expression was much less readable, though, and Natsu gave up trying after a few seconds.

The room was tense as eyes shifted to Gajeel. He was staring off to the side, finding interest in Lucy's dorm room walls, but after realizing the floor was his, Gajeel focused on Levy, looking her in the face. "Sorry, shrimp," he said, immediately looking away again. "What I did to you and your pals… I thought I was just followin' orders and I had to. But somebody knocked some sense into me and… Well I was wrong. I'm not askin' ya to forgive me or anything like that. Just wanted to tell ya."

Levy's eyes were wide as Gajeel spoke, and both Natsu and Lucy were watching her closely as Gajeel pulled something out of his coat. "Also," he was saying, "I wanted t'give this back."

Held awkwardly between his large hands was a hard-backed book of sizeable page volume. If Levy could look any more shocked than before, she would have, and after staring at the book for a long second, she stood up from Lucy's bed and walked slowly over to Gajeel. She stared him hard in the face, then dropped her hazel eyes onto the book and took it from Gajeel's big hands into her small ones.

"Thanks," she said.

"It was yours in the first place," Gajeel mumbled, rubbing his neck and pointedly _not_ looking at Levy any longer. He opened the door then and announced, "I'm headin' back. Later."

"A fresh start, huh," Lucy mused, brown eyes sweeping Natsu's face. "That definitely wasn't how I pictured meeting you for real, though."

"Whadya mean 'for real?'" asked Natsu. "We've talked before."

"Yelling through windows doesn't count," Lucy said with a smile. "But maybe we could do it again sometime?"

The idea made Natsu feel a little bit warmer inside. And a _tiny_ bit grateful to Gajeel too, because it was his fault that Natsu was over here in the first place, but more importantly, it seemed that Natsu was going to get his way. Maybe he and Lucy _could_ be friends, and not just kids who yelled at each other to shut up because their windows were too close.

"Yeah," he heard himself agreeing, "you're on."

He and Lucy were standing close, close enough that they could probably be touching if more familiar with each other, and so finally, Natsu held out a hand. Lucy high-fived it and laughed.

Natsu was saved from that contagious sound by the voice of Levy, who he would later admit to have totally forgotten about when talking with Lucy.

Yes, he had a short attention span. Just another Gray teased him about.

"You're a good guy, Natsu," Levy said, also now smiling. "Hey, what's your last name?"

Puzzled, Natsu answered, "Dragneel, why'd you ask?"

Levy shook her head as she ducked around Natsu. "Just curious." With a wave to her blonde friend and a short, "Bye, Lu-chan!" Levy was also leaving the room.

Despite wanting to stay and chat with Lucy, Natsu's late afternoon plans were ultimately determined by a rumble of his stomach, and so he also turned to leave. "See ya, Luigi," he said cheekily.

He was answered with an indignant cry of, " _It's Lucy!_ " and a swift kick in the rear on his way out the door.

And yes, Natsu decided as he rubbed his sore backside on the way to the mess hall, Lucy was definitely stronger than she looked.


End file.
